Pete Moore and Omar S. Dahi

The concept of a war economy has varied considerably. Historically, the term referred to a marshalling of national resources to support a state’s prosecution of war. Walter Oakes argued that “a war economy exists whenever the government’s expenditures for war (or ‘national defense’) become a legitimate and significant end-purpose of economic activity” (Oakes 1944: 12). Oakes and other scholars saw war economies as logical developments of capitalism in the core ...